Projects and Labs

Climate

Established in 2013, The Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) develops, deploys and operates observations, models and decision support tools to deal with too much or too little precipitation and runoff, including those associated with current and emerging socio-economic vulnerabilities and a changing environment.

NDOEX addresses questions of climate change that are of high priority and of great value to the US and the international community. The project's goal is to study natural and anthropogenic climate forcing by aerosols and feedbacks on regional and global climate.

The Russell group develops models and analyzes observations to understand the microphysical and chemical evolution of aerosol particles in the atmosphere. Our aim is to characterize the role of atmospheric aerosols on the Earth's climate.

Physical Oceanography

Argo is a global array of 3,000 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all databeing relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection.

NOAA's Ships of Opportunity program allowed CASPO researchers to deploy XBT probes while crossing the oceans aboard commercial merchant vessels. The probes are launched every 10-40 km along the transects about four times a year with the temperature data made available at http://www-hrx.ucsd.edu/index.html.

Spray is an underwater glider developed under ONR support by Scripps and Woods Hole scientists to provide a small long-range autonomous platform for long-term ocean measurements. Sprays generally operate for several months at a time. During these missions the glider collects data using it’s instruments, including CTD sensors (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth), fluorometers, ADPs (Acoustic Doppler Profiler), back scatter sensors, ISUS (Nitrate) units, altimeters and acoustic modems for communicating with subsurface moorings.

A global array of 1250 satellite-tracked surface drifting buoys that provides in-situ observations of mixed layer currents, sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, winds and salinity. The GDP program also provides a data processing system for scientific use of these data.